Fantastic EMIM 2025 Conference!

Euro-BioImaging staff was delighted to attend the European Molecular Imaging Meeting 2025 in Bilbao that took place from March 11th to March 14th 2025. It was the 20th edition of EMIM, and the event brought together 1200 scientists from the European molecular imaging community.

The European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) represents the scientific community involved in multidisciplinary molecular imaging science ranging in scale from the micro to the human. This includes basic, preclinical, translational, and clinical research on imaging technologies, methodologies, biomarkers and probes, modelling and data analysis. Since 2005, ESMI has organised the EMIM conferences that run every year with the purpose to connect scientists from around the globe to create a collaborative community to pursue new ideas for imaging biological processes.

Lots of interesting scientific events happened with high quality scientific talks highlighting the latest developments in the molecular imaging field applied to brain, immune system, cancer, cardiovascular, theranostics, in vitro models, new contrast agents’ developments and several other areas where imaging technologies play a key role at all scale levels.

Special Session on Innovation

This year part of the Euro-BioImaging team was present with a booth during the 5 days of the conference and was pleased to hold a special infrastructure session entitled “Accelerating Innovation: Open Science & Collaboration” organized in collaboration with the ESMI Study Group aiming at discovering initiatives enhancing imaging research excellence, driving scientific discovery and innovation in biomedical research.  The session was organized by Linda Chaabane (Euro-BioImaging Med-Hub section director) and a Euro-BioImaging Scientific Ambassador, Alexandros Marios Sofias (Aachen University, Chair of the Image-Guided Drug Delivery ESMI study group). The goal was  to gather key speakers to explore various initiatives towards open science. 

Mangala Srinivas¹ introduced Open Research Europe (ORE), an open access publishing platform for the publication of research stemming from European Commission funding across all subjects’ areas. She was followed by Monique R. Bernsen² who presented AMICE, a Dutch national imaging network connecting several facilities around the Netherlands for supporting multi-modal imaging requests. Then, two ESMI Study Group Members, Dimitris Gorpas³ and Verena Pichler⁴ presented important emerging insights by the scientific communities working in the Imaging area. In particular, Dimitris highlighted the importance of standardization of systems and procedures in Fluorescence Molecular Imaging and Endoscopy including also all the other imaging sectors, while Verena discussed the sustainability of medical imaging advocating for the need of environmental friendly contrast agents. Lastly, Dario Longo⁵ introduced the Euro-BioImaging foundingGIDE project discussing the ongoing activities and advancements related to the development of a common metadata framework and identification on ontologies for preclinical imaging to support interoperability and make FAIR data.

Great contributions from our Scientific Ambassadors

A special thanks is given to our Scientific Ambassadors Alexandros Marios Sofias who helped us in the session organisation and chairing and Claudia Benke on behalf of Christian Dullin in highlighting the project he conducted at the ELETTRA synchrotron, part of Phase Contrast Imaging Flagship Node Trieste, a Euro-BioImaging Node. 

Overall, the Hub team enjoyed learning about the most recent developments in molecular imaging research, meeting some of our Nodes members, engaging with potential new users and industry partners, but it was also a great time for the ESMI, which celebrated its 20th anniversary, and for one of our Node leaders, Prof. Michal Neeman (Israel BioImaging), who received the ESMI honorary membership award.

While congratulating Prof. Neeman upon her prize, we would also like to acknowledge the ESMI for giving us the opportunity to participate in this event, which is a unique tool for strengthening or establishing collaborative partnerships and reaching out broadly to our stakeholders.

Looking forward to the next EMIM in Ljubljana!

Article written by Erika Cerutti